Walking on Broken Glass - Christa Allan [118]
“Your being a victim of sexual assault, the subtle manipulations, that's something else entirely, do you hear me?” Melinda said. “This ‘Leah as victim’ is the Leah your brother Peter saw overtaking his sister. You need to own this Leah too. When you wrote checks that bounced, what did you do?”
How many curtains, God? How many?
You can do all things I ask you to do. Christ gives you strength and power.
“When you overspent on the credit cards, what did you do? When you backed into the mailbox? When you got drunk at company dinners? How did you make it all go away?”
“I chose to not make decisions. I asked Carl what he wanted me to do. Should I buy this or that? If this didn’t work, then it certainly wasn’t my fault. I didn’t make the decision,” I said.
Deciding not to decide is a decision.
I learned, through my years with Carl, how to maneuver my way through his world. To get what I wanted, I’d give him what he wanted. Alcohol was my key. It opened the door to falseness that could buy me peace.
I didn’t have to like having sex to understand and know what it could do for me when I was sober.
46
After my marathon session with Melinda I told Molly that my drive home was sobering. Neither one of us laughed.
As close as I felt to Molly, I couldn’t share any more than that. I didn’t even know how I would share it with Carl. The delay in his finishing the project proved to be a blessing. It bought me time.
Carl couldn’t come with me to Dr. Nolan's, so I asked Molly if she’d go with me. I didn’t want to be alone when Dr. Nolan told me pink or blue. As thrilled as I was about this baby, I’d already spent weeks and months collecting passport stamps out of “what if?” land. I tried to reconcile my joy and my pain. My excitement about the baby felt like betrayal when I thought of Alyssa. But yet I couldn’t deny the happiness I felt carrying this child. I prayed not to be consumed with worry. Some days I did better than others. Some days the questions stung like bees. What if the baby's a girl? What if she looks like Alyssa? What if she doesn’t? What if she's not as cute as Alyssa? What if she's cuter? What if … ?
This pregnancy was different, not just emotionally, but physically. Dr. Nolan mentioned toxemia and the issue of pregnancy-related diabetes. I didn’t remember gaining weight like this when I was pregnant with Alyssa. Not that I’d stopped to calculate the gallons of ice cream I’d consumed since the beginning of July. I trusted Dr. Nolan to figure it all out.
I changed into my fashionable, crinkled paper, baby chicken yellow exam wear and waited for Dr. Nolan. Molly amused herself with the assortment of dolls, bears, and toys around the exam room.
“You’d think she was a pediatrician,” Molly remarked, opening a quilted cotton ark filled with finger puppets of Noah, his family, and a few animals. “This is too cute.” Molly giggled as she slipped Noah on her finger. She started to slip on more of the ark, when Dr. Nolan stepped in.
“Hey, isn’t that a clever thing? Watch this.” Dr. Nolan showed Molly how the ark became a carrying pouch, handed it to her, and said, “All the way from Peru.”
“Are we on Jeopardy?” Molly looked at me with eye-rolling confusion.
“That ark was made in Peru,” Dr. Nolan said. “From all over the world—Africa, India, Kenya, Vietnam, Bangladesh— handcrafted. God blessed me when I opened my practice here. I wanted to bless mothers who didn’t have the advantages we have. I found A Greater Gift, and I’ve been gifting ever since.”
Molly was entranced. She traded Noah for a parrot flute.
“Don’t even think about it, girlfriend. This baby's already wiggling all over the place,” I only half-jokingly warned her.
“Speaking of advantages,” Dr. Nolan laughed, “how's Princess Leah? And where's Jean Luc?”
Molly's eyebrows met in the middle when she heard Dr. Nolan's name for Carl.
“He's on a mission in Pine Knoll, sent by the Federation Thorntons. They’re opening a new enterprise there. Lowercase ‘e’ enterprise.”
Dr. Nolan gooped up my growing belly